Spread The Misery, Spread The Joy

The sun is shining, and I'm stuck in the library, so I thought I would finally share what many of you have been clamouring for for years and years, albeit, to your credit, silently: fragments from the texts I'm reading. Well, I've just finished a survey of 28 years' worth of newspaper articles on Polish poetry, so I'll give you quotes from three articles, and because I like you that much, I'll even throw in one from a book at no extra charge. here goes:

New York Times, 7-2-1985:

So many Poles spend so much of their time waiting for a ''kolporter'' that one might conclude that there is a revivalist cult of the American songwriter here. But the word that sounds like Cole Porter actually refers to something clandestine.

The Vancouver Sun, 19-12-1991:

The love scenes presented a problem for the 77 Polish translators who have so far prepared 84 titles for publication. Polish, it seems, lacks the proper language for delicately describing the kind of love Harlequin specializes in. The texts, even in the hands of the best interpreters, came back either as complete vulgarity, or else sounding like a medical consultation between doctors. Harlequin asked a number of prominent Polish poets and writers to try to inspire the translators with samples of dialogue for a love scene.

Los Angeles Times, 1-10-2006:

Engdahl, a mere schoolboy at 57 compared with some of his colleagues on the committee, enjoys a kind of notoriety in Swedish literary circles that he often refers to as hurtful. Why do they hate him so? While Ahnlund likes a good human story, Engdahl is a post-structuralist who believes in things like "textual analysis." In his speech at the presentation of the Nobel to Jelinek, he quoted Hegel (never popular at parties): "Woman is society's irony.""If literature is a force that leads to nothing," Engdahl pressed on, addressing Jelinek, "you are, in our day, one of its truest representatives." (Thunderous applause.)

And the book - Remaining Relevant After Communism, by Andrew Wachtel:

Artistic literature in the postsocialist cultural model ahs become socially unnecessary, an almost completely private affair which lacks any social importance and which is interesting only to narrow academic circles, to writers, and to rare dedicated readers who nurture their passion as other marginal groups nurture theirs: some people belong to satanic cults, some to the Society for Lovers of Bulldogs, and others, amazingly, read Serbian poetry.